Interview: how Deus Ex: Human Revolution updated classic play

We speak with the lead designer of Deus Ex: Human Revolution about convincing …

There are few games with both the respect and baggage of Deus Ex. The original PC game is considered by many to be a masterpiece, and the sequel—Invisible War—is considered by many to be one of the most disappointing games ever released. Eidos Montreal has been working on a new Deus Ex title that is part prequel and part reboot, with Square Enix as the publisher.

There have only been two Deus Ex titles, and only one of them has been good. With a new team at the helm, a new publisher, and one delay already in the bag, gamers have been nothing but skeptical about the new release, and rightly so. We were able to sit down with Jean-Francois Dugas, the game's lead designer, who was able to answer our questions about the game, explain why changes to the core mechanics have been made, and how they made sure the game still felt like a Deus Ex title.

If you're a fan of the original, get excited.

My first question was based on the reactions I had gotten from gamers who found out I had played a lengthy portion of the game: how much time has he spent simply telling gamers that the title wouldn't be terrible? He laughed, and said he has spent four years getting that message out. "The most hardcore fans, until they can see something or put their hands on the game, there will be concern, and they will be doubtful," Dugas told Ars.

That's one of the reasons why a ten-hour portion of the game was sent to the press: it was a way to get the message out that the game was real, and it's very good. "To really get a good sense of the experience, you cannot just play for five minutes. It's the kind of experience you need to immerse yourself into and learn about the possibilities," he said. "That's why it was important for us to give more than just a snapshot of the game."

Human Revolution has been in development for four years, and has seen its original publisher merge with Square Enix. It also saw a lengthy delay, with its release pushed back to August of this year. I asked if he would describe the development as troubled, or harder than they expected. "I would say that early on when we accepted the challenge to make a Deus Ex game we already knew we were embarking on one hell of a ride. To which extent I would say that we had no clue at all, but we knew we were going into something quite big."

Dugas said they weren't afraid to take two steps back before taking one forward. Every decision was made with the quality of the game in mind, and the extra time has been spent on tightening the mechanics and polishing the game.

Third-person kills and regenerating health divide fans

Two changes to the original game have left some fans skeptical of the game's direction, and I wanted to get Dugas' thoughts on why these decisions were made. The first is the way the camera moves from first-person to third-person when you move into cover or perform a takedown move. It can be jarring—in some cases feeling like it removes you from the action to some degree. He said this was a change the team was comfortable with.

Deux Ex: Human Revolution

"We debated it when we were in conception," Dugas told Ars. "I would say with this one there was not a huge debate. We really wanted to showcase the augmentations, and we wanted to explore the mechanical augmentations and we wanted those things to be eminent in the experience to go along with the themes. The third-person moments were built for exposing the character, and exposing the fact that he has been crippled, but he's back with these augmentations, which allow him to do these crazy things."

This is a major theme of the game. Adam Jensen is placed in a position early in the game where he's heavily augmented in an experimental procedure, and he wakes up looking part man, and part machine. The characters in the game recognize that he's something different, and this is a world where the augmentations he uses in combat are beyond cutting edge. To many characters, he's an unsettling presence.

"We fleshed it out over the last four years, but very early on we knew trans-humanism would be a major theme in the game," he said. "We thought about what's in the real world, and how we can improve ourselves with technology, and we really wanted to exploit that and see it from the perspective of… it's not like he's against it, but like everyone else in life we like when we have the choice to decide what to do or not."

This isn't a life Jensen asked for, but it comes with certain advantages, with just as many downsides. The character was meant to be someone the player could relate to.

"The fact he looks uncanny, or an outcast, it was to convey the feeling more strongly. We always think about the good things, but what about the downsides?" he asked. "That's what we wanted to bring into the game."

The other major change is the now-common regenerating health. If you find cover and take a few moments, you'll regain your energy, and can jump back into the fight. What's hard to convey until you've played the game is how powerful the weapons are, and how fragile you feel before you improve your augmentations. The regenerating health may have changed the flow of the game, but it certainly didn't make it an easy play.

It wasn't always this way. "We knew we wanted it to be tactical. We wanted players to think, and to maybe find new ways of getting around and doing things. Those were the scaffolds of what we wanted to fit with the combat system." They did a lengthy testing session, and they found that players weren't being challenged, and they didn't need to use the cover or to really think about their moves. There was simply no reason for players to slow down and think about what they were doing.

Regenerating health or not, with the newly balanced game, you'll be afraid of the enemies; they can kill you with only a few rounds from their weapons. When you hear a gunshot, you'll want to get down. If you don't have an exit strategy, you'll be hunted and killed. Focusing on the regenerating health is silly when the guns and gunfights feel so brutal. "We think we found the right balance of scaring the player, and giving them a chance to recover if they play well," he said.

Creating a modern game for fans of a classic

With all these changes, how did they make sure the game felt like Deus Ex? "We didn't go for one feature or another; we didn't think, 'Oh my god it needs to be the same.' We went back to the original game and tried to analyze the heck out of it to find the key points and the pillars of gameplay. We identified those and brainstormed how we wanted to portray those really important pillars."

The team knew that by bringing their own personalities and design ideas to the game while respecting what made Deus Ex such a special game, they could make something great, and that didn't mean replicating the original's mechanics. It did mean keeping what he continually referred to as the "pillars." I asked what those were.

He didn't hesitate. "There are several, but the main ones were the mix of genres, with the stealth-combat-hacking-social, and it had to be a story-driven game that was conspiracy-laden. We knew that characters had to be very strong. We knew we had to create a cyber-punk dystopian future." They were comfortable creating their own aesthetic for the game, and he notes that even in its time Deus Ex was not the prettiest game on the market.

"We wanted to create our own signature, and everything had to give the player ways to express themselves through the mechanics, through the items and objects, and use the augmentations to create their own solutions to challenges," he explained. It was that sense of keeping what was important while having the freedom to make changes that helped guide the team to create the game.

I've been lucky enough to play a large section of the game, and I'll get to play yet another portion later in the game at a pre-E3 preview event. From what I've seen, this is the Deus Ex sequel you've been waiting for.

73 Reader Comments

Deus Ex Invisible War was not a bad game it actually had a lot to offer and if it was called "Tech Solider: Invisible War" or something it would probably be remembered fondly today. The disappointment came from the fans of Deus Ex who expected more or less the same type of game with better graphics and recieved a heavily consolized experience

I really liked this article. I expected a more Q&A approach, but the free form developer mindset angle is actually more reassuring to me. I was a fan of the original game, and not IW, but it wasn't because it was too console-friendly. It sounds like the devs understand what made the series what it was. Now to hope they have the chops to put that understanding into practice.

Deus Ex Invisible War was not a bad game it actually had a lot to offer and if it was called "Tech Solider: Invisible War" or something it would probably be remembered fondly today. The disappointment came from the fans of Deus Ex who expected more or less the same type of game with better graphics and recieved a heavily consolized experience

This. IW wasn't a bad game, it was a pretty decent or even a good game. Deus Ex was just a game of another magnitude in awesome and IW wasn't up to that level, hence it was marked as bad. At least it sounds like this one might shape up to be a real in depth FPS/RPG, I miss my Warren Spector titles.

Count me as one of the people still somewhat wary of the game, because in the interview Jean-Francois said they worked on identifying what made Deus Ex great, but then listed some pretty generic terms as things they worked on. And for me, the biggest pillar was one that was left unsaid, which was the reactive, logical gameworld the Deus Ex presented. It was like Trespasser done right. Doors had health, so you could blow them up with an explosive barrel. But barrels had weight which made them hard to pickup unless you had the strength mod. Things that are heavy hurt, so if you were strong enough you could drop heavy things on enemies provided you were strong enough.

Another way of thinking about it is as the anti-half-life in that instead of intricately scripting situations, objects and the levels themselves were given intricate properties that could realistically interact, allowing a player to deduce their own solution based on the properties of objects at hand. I hope the game will be great and that it will still allow that sort of expression in problem solving that the original allowed, but I haven't seen that explicitly called out as something you can do which worries me.

The FPS/TPS integration in the game is top notch. (Yes, I have the "demo", and yes, it made me preorder the game.)

If you want to be anal retentive about it, I guess you can enjoy not enjoying the game. But the reality of the implementation is that it simply makes the game much better. For the first time, you have excellent cover mechanics with the visceral nature of a first-person viewpoint, minus 90% of the clunkiness you find in any other game that tries to combine the two, never mind any FPS where you ridiculously "strafe" to avoid fire since no cover mechanic even exists.

The only odd thing is that when you come out of cover, you instantly transition to FPS view, so you somewhat jarringly go from "guy with back against wall" to "gun pointed directly at the wall". Maybe they could have done a transition animation in between, but then you'd lose precious time in a firefight.

Alright, well... okay, I feel bad. I've played the press demo; it's been leaked online, and cracked. I'm a bad person, I know, but I can't rent PC games at Family Video, and Fable 3 teaches us that cross-platform games are not to be trusted. I felt the need to bleach my HDD after installing /that/ one.

I wasn't planning on buying the game, as I've got other things I was gonna spend my gaming budget on, but the time spent in that "demo/beta/thing" sold my preorder easily. They aren't kidding. It feels like the original, but if it was made nowadays, with all the /good/ things that we've learned in the decade-or-so that has passed since the first came out. It feels lethal, it feels tactical, the upgrades all feel "weighty", making each upgrade point you get feel like an agonizing decision, and the time between levels seem like the time spent after getting into bed on Christmas Eve. The writing (so far) is good, and the plot leaves you wanting more.

That apartment building? Yeah, you can get into it, if you're thinking properly; the level 4 security door inside of it, that you can't crack yet? It still haunts my dreams at night. Inventory management is important; that rocket launcher takes up half your inventory, and is amazing... but how often are you gonna use it? Ammo isn't lying around on every street corner, and the guns you pick up don't contain full clips... so you sweat as you lay down fire, hoping for that headshot you /need/, or else this guy's buddies are going to clean the streets with your corpse.

Even things like hacking have become a pretty rich mini-game, although mini-game does it less justice than you'd think; each hack manages to be a tense, strategic 10-20 second flurry of decision-making and crossed fingers. It's just... gah!

[pants a bit, takes a deep breath]

This is the game I've been waiting nearly 12 years for. As far as I can tell, it's worth the wait.

... the biggest pillar was one that was left unsaid, which was the reactive, logical gameworld the Deus Ex presented. It was like Trespasser done right. Doors had health, so you could blow them up with an explosive barrel. But barrels had weight which made them hard to pickup unless you had the strength mod. Things that are heavy hurt, so if you were strong enough you could drop heavy things on enemies provided you were strong enough.

This. Unfortunately I doubt we'll be seeing anything like this in this new Deus Ex. It could still be a good game, even a great one, but if the multiple solutions are all pre-planned by the developers, as oppose to having the option of coming up with them based on consistent rules of the gameworld, it will lose part of the charm of the original.

I was one of the dudes that downloaded the leaked beta. Then promptly paid for my pre-order on steam after playing it. So in my opinion the best way to convince fans it's not IW all over again, is to release an honest to goodness demo to the public and let the game speak for itself. Human Revolution is f'ing awesome and the Eidos Montreal folks did a spectacular job of capturing the look and game play feel for a Deus Ex title.

As a geek who's played most every great PC game from M.U.L.E. and Archon, to present day, I have to shamefully admit that I have never played Deus Ex -- not sure why, just never got around to it. I'm really tempted to buy the original and give it a run through in preparation for this new version.

I like the feel of this game. I know it may sound silly, but the original gave me a Shadowrun (the tabletop, not the other crap) feel. Watching the trailers for this gives me a very similar feeling, I can't promise it will be a day one purchase, but I do plan to keep this one on my radar.

Deus Ex Invisible War was not a bad game it actually had a lot to offer and if it was called "Tech Solider: Invisible War" or something it would probably be remembered fondly today.

It probably wouldn't be remembered at all. The name is the only reason anyone bothered with it.

skicow wrote:

As a geek who's played most every great PC game from M.U.L.E. and Archon, to present day, I have to shamefully admit that I have never played Deus Ex -- not sure why, just never got around to it. I'm really tempted to buy the original and give it a run through in preparation for this new version.

Steam has a bundle of a preorder for Human Revolution along with the original.

As a geek who's played most every great PC game from M.U.L.E. and Archon, to present day, I have to shamefully admit that I have never played Deus Ex -- not sure why, just never got around to it. I'm really tempted to buy the original and give it a run through in preparation for this new version.

Same here mostly. Well okay, I played partway into the second mission. No idea why I could never stick with it. Maybe sometime this summer I'll crack down and finish it.

For me, the pillars would be:Strong story (evocative, good characterization, WTF moments should be awesome, not stupid (aka: Indigo Prophecy's Ninja Cyborg Witches from teh FUTURE!1! were game stoppingly stupid)Exploration (cool stuff to find, large areas with nooks and cranies, additional story to find if you look)Fun combat (however you want to play, each style allows fun ways of doing things)Good progression (I love Witcher 2, but the game goes from 'OMG I'm dying' to 'I'm a GOD' in short order. The progression should be a little more granular then that).Deeper meaning (I like the games to have a deeper meaning then just a plot for stories sake)

I will say that I DIDN'T hate the second game. Maybe it was because I didn't realize I was supposed to, maybe because I got the game late enough that it was patched and I got the community texture patch and stuff. Either way, I enjoyed it, and even got the flame crossbow. If you laid bodies in a large enough area, you could start a fire that didn't go out. Each body would burn for a while, then enter a period where it wasn't flamible, then become flamible again. You just needed enough bodies that some would always be on fire and be able to light the ones that were just becoming flamable again.

Turning on extra-sensory vision mode while camping out on a roof top with a sniper rifle ... if they can get that down pat again ... I may be tempted to get a new PC just to play this. Er...I guess I should first ask if it's coming out on PC.

How is regenerating health (without using up a power-draining augmentation, of course) good? "Whoops, I've been shot up. Let's wait here a while and then continue on like nothing happened" is incredibly boring (the only part of both Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever that I don't like). "Oh, crap! I'm down to 10 health and have to get by this room of MJ12 troops!" was much more fun.

And are console players really so stupid that they need usuable objects to glow bright gold? :/ Won't be picking this one up, no matter how much I love the original...

As someone who has played the leaked preview, I have gone from being very skeptical about the game to having already pre-ordered it on Steam. It is a proper Deus Ex sequel: faithful yet modern. I for one cannot wait to play the whole thing.

To anyone thinking about playing the original: it's an amazing game with a slow start. The first mission is the worst, the second is the 2nd worst, but it gains speed very quickly and will suck you in if you are a bit patient with it in the beginning. The second game is a bit disappointing, but bear in mind it's disappointing when compared to one of the greatest games ever made; it's still good and very much worth playing.

I sincerely hope this isn't console-ized. I was a HUGE fan of Deus Ex, but nothing gets me more disappointed in a developer than buying a sequel, only to discover it was engineered for a game pad and not mouse and keyboard (with remappable keys, damnit - I like my arrow keys, NOT AWSD)

The characters in the game recognize that he's something different, and this is a world where the augmentations he uses in combat are beyond cutting edge. To many characters, he's an unsettling presence.

Turning on extra-sensory vision mode while camping out on a roof top with a sniper rifle ... if they can get that down pat again ... I may be tempted to get a new PC just to play this. Er...I guess I should first ask if it's coming out on PC.

Yup, you can preorder on Steam and if you want to pony up an extra $5 you can get the original one as well.

I sincerely hope this isn't console-ized. I was a HUGE fan of Deus Ex, but nothing gets me more disappointed in a developer than buying a sequel, only to discover it was engineered for a game pad and not mouse and keyboard (with remappable keys, damnit - I like my arrow keys, NOT AWSD)

It is definitely not a shoddy port; they've taken the time to make good use of the keyboard/mouse.

Like many others here I tried the leaked version and it was indeed quite promising. However there still were some annoyingly consoleish features (mainly the annoyingly low FOV for PC gaming) and I'd much much much rather have first person leaning around corners instead of that silly third person "cover" system. But no judging the game until it's properly out of course.

The characters in the game recognize that he's something different, and this is a world where the augmentations he uses in combat are beyond cutting edge. To many characters, he's an unsettling presence.

Couldn't he just, you know, put on a jacket?

This game is more than just about wearing baggy trenchcoats that make us look bigger than we really are.

On a not entirely unrelated sidenote: Why all the love for regenerating health? Now valve just has to tell us that ep3 will have it too and I think it has completely taken over the FPS world. And I don't see any reason why that should be so - you get rid of a complete tactical factor (every fight starts from 0; now just get rid of ammo limits) and replace it with sitting behind rocks and waiting for your health to magically return.

Especially for a game as Deus Ex I don't see how that fits.

Anyways one thing that wasn't named already which made the original stand out: You could finish the game with every skill tree in a reasonable manner (ie the skill tree was actually somehow useful) and the same was true for the not-combat fixated trees - something which most - if not all (remember one?) - later RPGs have shamefully neglected. All those games where you can pick some rogue like tree only to be thrown into head-on confrontations against big bad bosses somewhere along the lines.

I'm still surprised about all the people who loved the first game and don't want to play this or keep repeating the same crap without doing any research (or it appears that way).

I just played the "demo" at a friends house and it fantastic. The regenerating health isn't really an issue since you'll die from a few shots anyways (at least on "Give me Deus Ex" difficulty). Think of it just like the regeneration aug from the first game since you can upgrade how fast you regenerate in human revolution as well. There are even food items as well but I can't recall if they heal you, recharge your energy or both.

Another point to note is that the object highlighting is not only optional but turning up the difficulty turns it off anyways.

What I didn't expect to love is the cover/stealth system. It's awesome! You have to hide any bodies you kill/knockout otherwise the other guards will wake up sleeping guards or trigger alarms; very metal gear. The third person can be ignored if you really want since you can just crouch behind boxes anyways but it's all sorts of sweet.

As a geek who's played most every great PC game from M.U.L.E. and Archon, to present day, I have to shamefully admit that I have never played Deus Ex -- not sure why, just never got around to it. I'm really tempted to buy the original and give it a run through in preparation for this new version.

Because it looks and plays like ass, at least in the first level and without the modern mods installed. I paid $1 for it and I didn't get past 10 minutes.

As a geek who's played most every great PC game from M.U.L.E. and Archon, to present day, I have to shamefully admit that I have never played Deus Ex -- not sure why, just never got around to it. I'm really tempted to buy the original and give it a run through in preparation for this new version.

How is regenerating health (without using up a power-draining augmentation, of course) good? "Whoops, I've been shot up. Let's wait here a while and then continue on like nothing happened" is incredibly boring (the only part of both Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever that I don't like). "Oh, crap! I'm down to 10 health and have to get by this room of MJ12 troops!" was much more fun.

And are console players really so stupid that they need usuable objects to glow bright gold? :/ Won't be picking this one up, no matter how much I love the original...

Sucks for you then. Every modern game has regenerating health so that's irrelevant unless you just don't plan to play any games made since 2003. You also die in about three seconds if you're exposed to fire, so it doesn't even matter. Just makes the game less tedious and annoying with inventory management.

The highlighting you can turn off completely, though I wouldn't advise it, unless you actually enjoy testing 20 different boxes and doors to find what's needed. I thought it would be very annoying but it doesn't really bother me at all, probably because it's proximity based anyway.

... the biggest pillar was one that was left unsaid, which was the reactive, logical gameworld the Deus Ex presented. It was like Trespasser done right. Doors had health, so you could blow them up with an explosive barrel. But barrels had weight which made them hard to pickup unless you had the strength mod. Things that are heavy hurt, so if you were strong enough you could drop heavy things on enemies provided you were strong enough.

This. Unfortunately I doubt we'll be seeing anything like this in this new Deus Ex. It could still be a good game, even a great one, but if the multiple solutions are all pre-planned by the developers, as oppose to having the option of coming up with them based on consistent rules of the gameworld, it will lose part of the charm of the original.

Someone linked me to this quote a couple days ago:"All locks on doors are electronic, and must be hacked. HOWEVER, doors still have health - the game just doesn't display it. You can still blow up doors, AS WELL AS shoot them to bits if you pump enough bullets into them from any weapon (a couple of pistol clips seems to do it).

Ammo is quite rare on hardest difficulty though so you can't do this willy-nilly.

But that's not all - doors are subject to PHYSICS DAMAGE too. I basically broke into half of the Detroit Police Station by bashing my trusty fridge against any locked door that stood in my way.

Looks like much of the first game's systemic elements have survived!Oh yeah, another point: when you set the fridge down, you can snap to it as a cover object.